Uruguay President Wants Drug War to Stop

President Seeks Drug Decriminalization

Uruguayan President Becomes First Head of State to Call for Legalization of Drugs, Story Ignored by US Press

Below is a news report from our friends at drcnet.org

In a series of increasingly pointed comments at international forums, Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle has become the first sitting head of state to call for drug legalization. Batlle’s remarks were the latest moves in an incipient effort by Uruguay and its Mercosur partners — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay — to chart an independent path out of the US-led drug war quagmire.

Although Batlle spoke out weeks ago, on November 20th at the 10th Latin American Summit of Heads of State in Panama City and at the December 1st inauguration of Vicente Fox in Mexico City, both events well-attended by the international media, American media consumers never knew it happened. Not until the Narco News Bulletin (http://www.narconews.com) broke the story a week ago, with the Week Online and the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation both running with it, did any major media outlet give mention.

The following paragraph appeared under Clifford Krauss’ byline in the New York Times on December 23rd. It is the sum total of mainstream media reporting to date on Batlle’s remarks.

“President Jorge Batlle, who is known for speaking his mind on contentious subjects, spoke out in favor of the decriminalization of drugs in a television interview. He said he was only trying to provoke debate, but it was the first time a Latin American president had suggested that partial legalization of drugs could help fight addiction.”

Here’s the rest of the story:

According to a Narco News investigation, Batlle’s advisors had already begun circulating trial balloons last summer. (Visit http://www.narconews.com/heroyear2000.html for the complete account and links to Uruguayan press stories.)

On June 16th, Batlle’s chief of staff, Leonarda Costa was quoted by El Observador (Montevideo) as saying Uruguay would open discussions with its Mercosur partners about “the idea of legalizing the consumption of drugs.”

According to the newspaper, Batlle had already told the weekly Brecha he favored the legalization of drugs, and Costa confirmed it. “When the president said what he said, he was expressing his personal philosophy,” he said. “But it is viable to the extent that other countries also do it.”

Those remarks came as Batlle and other Latin American leaders confronted American pressures to support Plan Colombia, the US- designed military solution to Colombia’s deep-seated civil war and drug production.

Batlle joined other South American leaders at the Brasilia summit at the end of August. In a joint declaration, they praised the Colombian government’s protracted negotiations with leftist guerrillas, but pointedly refused to endorse Plan Colombia.

Then, on November 20th, while attending the Tenth Iberoamerican Summit of Chiefs of State and Government in Panama City, Batlle spoke out in greater detail.

According to Terra, an Uruguayan web-based news provider, Batlle called for a future summit devoted to the topic of the drug trade. “We can’t go on avoiding things in life,” he told his fellow leaders.

“How do you eliminate the profit from all of this?” asked Batlle. “Do you think that as long as that substance has such fantastic market power there could be any mechanism created to prevent its trafficking? How do you make it lose value so that everyone loses interest in that business?”

Batlle’s answer? End prohibition.

“If that little powder was worth only 10 cents, there would be no organizations dedicated to raising a billion dollars to finance armies in Colombia,” he said.

He also urged the assembled heads of state to “stop playing games, take a deep look and start seriously confronting the drug problem. But even if I’m wrong, why is there such a fear of asking ourselves this question?”

Ten days later in Mexico City, Batlle went even farther. According to El Observador, he pointed at the root of the problem. “The day that it is legalized in the United States, it will lose value, and if it loses value, there will be no profit. But as long as the US citizenry doesn’t rise up to do something, they will pass this life fighting and fighting.”

Again, Batlle’s position appeared driven by concern about Plan Colombia. “You have to think about the origin of the thing,” he argued. “Basically, where is this consumed? A minimum of 50 percent is consumed in the United States. It seems fine with me that my friend Pastrana (the Colombian president) tries to improve education, health and roads… but this doesn’t resolve the problem.”

He also compared today’s drug wars to alcohol Prohibition, and predicted that the current stalemate will end “on the day that the consumers announce that this cannot be fixed by any other manner than changing this situation in the same way that was done with the ‘Dry Laws.’”

And, Batlle told El Observador, he had personally pitched the idea of legalization to President Clinton. Batlle did not report on Clinton’s response.

The 72-year-old Batlle won the presidency this year as head of the so-called conservative ‘Colorado’ Party, which defeated a coalition of centrist and left parties.

Is the president of Uruguay the only one who understands the law of supply and demand? What’s your opinion? Tell your views to The Progress Report!

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

the annoying habit of seeing the hand of land in almost all transactions. In geonomics we maintain the distinction between the items bearing exchange value that come into being via human effort — wealth — and those that don’t — land. Keeping this distinction in the forefront makes it obvious that speculating in land drives sprawl, that hoarding land retards Third World development, that borrowing to buy land plus buildings engorges banks, that much so-called “interest” is quasi-rent, that the cost of land inflates faster than the price of produced goods and services, that over half of corporate profit is from real estate (Urban Land Institute, 1999). Summing up these analyses, geonomists offer a Grand Unifying Theory, that the flow of rent pulls all other indicators in its wake. Geonomics differs from economics as chemistry from alchemy, as astronomy from astrology.

the study of the money we spend on the nature we use. When we pay that money to private owners, we reward both speculation and over-extraction. Robert Kiyosaki’s bestseller, Rich Dad’s Prophecy, says, “One of the reasons McDonald’s is such a rich company is not because it sells a lot of burgers but because it owns the land at some of the best intersections in the world. The main reason Kim and I invest in such properties is to own the land at the corner of the intersection. (p 200) My real estate advisor states that the rich either made their money in real estate or hold their money in real estate.” (p 141, via Greg Young) When government recovers the rents for natural advantages for everyone, it can save citizens millions. Ben Sevack, Montreal steel manufacturer, tells us (August 12) that Alberta, by leasing oil & gas fields, recovers enough revenue to be the only province in Canada to get by without a sales tax and to levy a flat provincial income tax. While running for re-election, provincial Premier Ralph Klein proposes to abolish their income tax and promises to eliminate medical insurance premiums and use resource revenue to pay for all medical expense for seniors. After all this planned tax-cutting and greater expense, they still expect a large budget surplus. Even places without oil and gas have high site values in their downtowns, and high values in their utility franchises. Recover the values of locations and privileges, displace the harmful taxes on sales, salaries, and structures, then use the revenue to fund basic government and pay residents a dividend, and you have geonomics in action.

more transformation than reform; it’s a step ahead. Harvard economics students this year did petition to change the curriculum, in the wake of the English who caught the dissension from across The Channel. French reformers, who fault conventional economics for conjuring mathematical models of little empirical relevance and being closed to critical and reflective thought, reject this “autism” – or detachment from reality – and dub their offering “post-autistic economics”. Not a bad name, but again, academics define themselves by what they’re not, not by what they are, unlike geonomists. We track rent – the money we spend on the nature we use – and watch it pull all the other economic indicators in its wake. We see economies as part of the ecosystem, similarly following natural patterns and able to self-regulate more so than allowed, once we quit distorting prices. To align people and planet, we’d replace taxes and subsidies with recovering and sharing rents.

a way to connect the dots. Making the cyber rounds is “The Cavernous Divide” by Scott Klinger, from AlterNet (posted March 21): “As the number of billionaires in the world expands, so does the number of those in poverty.” Duh. The yawning income gap is not news. Nearly every issue of our quarterly digest carries a similar quote. Yet the connection was worked out long ago by one of America’s greatest thinkers, Henry George, who labeled his masterpiece, Progress and Poverty. Techno- and socio-advances always enrich few and impoverish many. Yet progress also pushes up location values – the geonomic insight (is Silicon Valley cheaper now or more expensive?). Instead of taxing income, sales, or buildings, society could collect those values of sites, resources, EM spectrum, and ecosystem services via fees and dues, which would lower the income ceiling, and instead of lavishing corporate welfare, pay out the recovered revenue via dividends, which would jack up the income floor. Dots connected.

about the money we spend on the nature we use. It flows torrentially yet invisibly, often submerged in the price of housing, food, fuel, and everything else. Flowing from the many to the few, natural rent distorts prices and rewards unjust and unsustainable choices. Redirected via dues and dividends to flow from each to all, “rent” payments would level the playing field and empower neighbors to shrink their workweek and expand their horizons. Modeled on nature’s feedback loops, earlier proposals to redirect rent found favor with Paine, Tolstoy, and Einstein. Wherever tried, to the degree tried, redirecting rent worked. One of today’s versions, the green tax shift, spreads out of Europe. Another, the Property Tax Shift, activists can win at the local level, building a world that works right for everyone.

a study of a phenomenon David Ricardo noted going on two centuries ago. When wine grapes rise to $10,000 a ton from the very best land (last year, cabernet sauvignon commanded an average of $4,021 a ton in the Napa Valley), then vineyard prices soar from $18,000 an acre in the 1980′s to $100,000 an acre five years ago and now for a top pedigree up to $300,000 an acre (The New York Times, April 9, via Wyn Achenbaum). Pricey land does not make wine pricey; spendy wine makes land spendy. While vintners make their wine tasty, nature and society in general – not any lone owner – make land desireable. Steve Kerch of CBS’s MarketWatch (April 5) notes that much of what a home sells for on the open market is a reflection of intangible factors such as what school district the house sits in. The price the builder has to pay for the land also tends to be driven by the same intangibles. Because the value of land comes from society, and because one’s use excludes the rest of society, each user owes all others compensation, and is owed compensation by everyone else. Sharing land’s value, instead of taxing one’s efforts, is the policy of geonomics.

not a panacea, but like John Muir said, “pull on any one thing, and find it connected to everything else.” Recall last month’s earthquake in El Salvador. We felt it and its formidable after-shocks in Nicaragua. Immediately afterwards, my host nation, one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, sent aid to its Central American neighbor. The Nica newspapers carried photos of the devastation. They showed that the cliff sides that crumbled had had homes built on them while the cliffs left pristine withstood the shock. Could monopoly of good, safe, flat land be pushing people to build on risky, unstable cliffs? If so, that’s just one more good reason to break up land monopoly. What works to break up land monopoly, history shows, is for society to collect the annual rental value of the underlying sites and resources. That’d spur owners to use level land efficiently, so no one would be excluded, forced to resort to cliffs. To prevent another man-induced landslide is yet another reason to spread geonomics.

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old loggers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.

close to the policy of the Garden Cities in England. Founded by Ebenezer Howard over a century ago, residents own the land in common and run the town as a business. Letchworth, the oldest of the model towns, serves residents grandly from bucketfuls of collected land rent (as does the Canadian Province of Alberta from oil royalty). A geonomic town would pay the rent to residents, letting them freely choose personalized services, and also ax taxes. Both geonomics and Howard were inspired by American proto-geonomist Henry George. The movement launched by Howard today in the UK advances the shift of taxes from buildings to locations. A recent report from the Town and Country Planning Association proposes this Property Tax Shift and their journal published research in the potential of land value taxation by Tony Vickers (Vol. 69, Part 5, 2000). (Thanks to James Robertson)

an answer for Jonathan of the Green Party (Nov 7): “What does ‘share our surplus’ mean?”Our surplus is the values that society generates synergistically. It’s the money we spend on the nature we use: on land sites, natural resources, EM spectrum, ecosystem services (assimilating pollutants). It’s also the money we pay to holders of government-granted privileges like corporate charters. We could share it by paying for the nature we use and privileges we hold to the public treasury then getting back a fair share of the recovered revenue. Used to be, owners did owe rent (“own” and “owe” used to be one word). And presently, some lucky residents do get back periodic dividends: Alaska’s oil dividend and Aspen Colorado’s housing assistance. Doing that, instead of subsidizing bads while taxing goods, is the essence of geonomics.
Jonathan: “Is local currency what you mean?”
Editor: It’s not. Community currency is a good reform, but every good reform pushes up site values. That makes land an even more tempting object of speculation. Now, any good will eventually do bad by widening the income gap – until you share land values.